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Virtual appeasement

A pretty senior guy at one of the large storage vendors recently declared "Let the virtualization wars begin!" during a phone conversation we were having. If we'd been on a videoconference, he would have seen my eyes roll. It's not like all of you will rush to take sides as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM roll out their respective virtualization/account control strategies. The storage industry has a penchant for "wars," most of which remind me of the '60s bumper sticker "What if they gave a war and no one came?" No one but analysts and press came to the SAN vs. NAS war or the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI war, and I predict that no users will come to the virtualization in the array vs. virtualization in the network war either. Honestly, I don't have an opinion about which approach is better. I'm pretty sure they all need work. There are persuasive arguments on both sides, but most of those need to be proven in practice. However, I do believe that overheating the debate with apocalyptic rhetoric is counterproductive, if predictable. ...

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